This article may also be viewed in the online international magazine, Live Encounters.

Editor, Mark Ulyseas, a popular fellow ‘M.T.’ blogger, is an Indian travel writer who supports Israel and all matters Jewish.

Naive, I know. But I was astounded, soon after settling in Karmiel, Northern Israel, to learn of local Jewish kids with drink and drugs problems.

I was also staggered to catch a couple of lads uprooting a sapling outside the library. My Hebrew is woefully limited but I managed to stop them – if only temporarily – by giving them the ‘Gorgon eye’.

Then a fellow immigrant described how he disturbed a potential burglar while at home in broad daylight and advised us all to update our security.

Meanwhile I met a school student whose mother helps ‘children at risk‘ and a friend began working… Read more

I repost here in full an article that has appeared in this week’s edition of The Jewish Chronicle Online.

“According to journalist Charles Moore, whose biography of Baroness Thatcher will be released only after her death, the former PM considered Jewish values and Conservatism ‘a natural fit’

“Her support for Jewish causes derived, he says, from her interactions as MP for Finchley with Jewish people.

“He also suggests that, as a Methodist, she drew her “raw political and social lessons from the Bible”, and emphasised the influence of Edith Muhlbauer, an Austrian Jewish teenager who, in 1938, stayed with the Roberts family in Grantham, after escaping Nazi persecution.

“’It had a significant impact,’ says Mr Moore. ’Edith was probably the first Jew she knew in the personal sense.’

Twenty years later, campaigning in Finchley, she infuriated local Conservatives by standing with the Liberals to… Read more